


Shadowland

by susurrant



Series: Roads [10]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dean Has Powers, M/M, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Slow Burn, Unrelated Winchesters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 07:32:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6229318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/susurrant/pseuds/susurrant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>If John closes his eyes he sees Dean grinning back at him with three black holes in his head. When John opens his eyes he sees Sam, standing in a bar surrounded by the dead and dying.</em>
</p><p>Three hundred and ninety-eight days ago John made a deal to bring Sam back. AU where Dean is not related to John or Sam.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadowland

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that "Author chooses not to use archive warnings," is a deliberate choice. If you're concerned about it and don't mind spoiling the story, see the end notes.

_And men forgot their passions in the dread_  
of this their desolation; and all hearts  
were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light  
Byron, _Darkness_

_Present_

John’s sixty miles northwest of Wichita Falls, and the air is so thick with heat and dust it feels like a second skin.  The land itself is sun-bleached and stale, even the sign for the fillup joint where he’s parked, the ragged edges of painted green aluminum hanging limply.

He rolls his right shoulder, stiff from the long drive.  The sling he’s supposed to be wearing is somewhere in the back seat - he hasn’t used it in weeks, although he probably should.  The nurse had been clear on that point, like she knew just by looking at him that he wasn’t going to follow doctor’s orders.  

She was right.  The follow-up appointment reminder note was tossed, crumpled up somewhere on the street two blocks from the hospital and he still had half of his codeine prescription left, saved up for a rainy day.

John shakes his head and focuses on the task at hand.

Gordon doesn’t answer his phone, but John isn’t worried.  Gordon screens his calls because he’s a paranoid motherfucker, and John can’t fault him for it.  He leaves a message, short and to the point. “ _I’m in town_ ,” and, “ _You better not be dead._ _What’ve you got?"_

He picks up a ready-made sandwich and a large bottle of water from inside the station, flipping his wallet open and thumbing out bills with his left hand in a way that he hasn’t quite managed to make look casual yet.  He’s gonna need to score more cash at some point.  He’s been trying to stay away from using the cards, trying to fly below the radar as much as possible.

Two hours later he’s got a room for the night and a fresh bottle of jack, and even with the shades pulled down and his eyes closed he can see Dean sitting on the other bed, grinning back at him with three black holes in his head.

  
*

  
John finds Gordon at a booth near the back of the diner.

“What’d you find?”

Gordon slides over a thick manila envelope.  “You look like shit.”

John meets his flat stare for a moment before shaking a stack of print-outs and news clippings out of the envelope.

“Six people - ” Gordon stops as the waitress comes by with a chipped mug and some flatware wrapped up in a napkin for John.

“What can I get for you?”

“Just the coffee, thanks.” John is careful to keep his hands folded over the printouts, it’s the kind of thing that gets noticed in a small town diner, crime scene photos spread out next to the lunch special.

She _humphs_ at him but fills his mug and moves off.

“Six people dead,” Gordon continues. “No outward signs of trauma, no defensive wounds on any of the vics. C.O.D. for all of them is cerebral hemorrhage.”

Gordon spreads his hands over the table, partially covering the pictures of blood spilling out of eyes, mouths, ears. “I pulled the security footage outside the bar, they walked in at 5:07, left at 5:10.”

“They?”

Gordon nods. “The girl was there too.”

John flips through the packet, the grainy black-and-whites from the security cam and the high-res ones of the bodies from the investigation after the fact.  Three minutes, six people. Two bartenders, wearing black t-shirts and slumped over the counter, dark pools of blood under their heads. There are close-ups of the faces - of wide bloodshot eyes and mouths stretched open too wide.

“And what about you?” Gordon asks.

“Just the one body, and nothing solid, but it was him alright.”

John passes across the table his own photos of a different scene. The vic is a middle aged man, bound and gagged in the center of a devil’s trap. He recognizes the messy scrawl of the sigils.

“Knife wound to the gut, coroner’s report says it must have taken a couple hours for the bastard to bleed out, they didn’t hit anything vital,” John adds.

“Guy’s been missing since when - last Wednesday?”

“Right. This wasn’t just a hit, they wanted him for something.”

“Seems a little off, taking out players on their own team.”

John flinches at that, tries his best not to show it. “Could be in-fighting. Maybe he saw the vic as competition. Or he wanted intel.”

“This guy have anything on him? Was he a player?”

“Demon inside him must’ve been, to end up inside that trap. The guy was clean - boring, mid-level desk job, nice wife, nothing fishy at the house or at work. What about yours?”

“Nothing. Some sulfur residue, but none on the bodies themselves. All looked pretty human to me. They’re still working on the autopsies, going over everything again trying to figure out what the hell happened. I got a guy on the inside keeping me informed.”

John spreads the photos across the table, rearranges them, hoping to tease out a reason from the mess of violence. There isn’t one. Oak Grove to Shreveport to Frederick, Oklahoma.

Sammy was on a road trip, and he was having a little fun along the way.

  
*

  
It isn’t anything like tracking the demon.

With Yellow Eyes, there had been clear signs - weather anomalies, electrical outages, stories in the paper where the names changed but the salient details never did. The problem then hadn’t been establishing a pattern. The problem was finding out where the bastard was going to be in time to actually get there and do something about it.  

He’d spent nearly twenty years on the trail, except it wasn’t anything so literal as a line on a map. Twenty years of tracking, twenty years spent closing his eyes each night with a promise to his wife that for everything he’d done wrong, he would get this one thing right. He’d hunt that fucker down and he’d make sure Mary’s boy was safe.

Yellow Eyes was dead and maybe Sam was safe, but he wasn’t Mary’s boy, not  anymore. Not since he and Dean had done - whatever the hell it was that they’d done - to break the deal.

Sam is still human, John thinks, at least mostly. He travels along roads and highways, stays in motels, eats in diners. Goes to bars, although not to drink. And John follows, picking up the pieces as he goes because he doesn’t have any other choice.

There are signs, now. Omens. There didn’t used to be. And the problem isn’t that he can’t track them, the problem is that there’s too damn many to mean anything.

The southwest is six weeks deep into the worst drought in seventy years, and a glut of F-4 tornadoes are cutting through a swath of land nearly 400 miles wide, stretching from Oklahoma City up to Des Moines. Four months ago a run of earthquakes and aftershocks had leveled a good-sized chunk of Manhattan. Wildfires were racing up the California coast, leaving thousands of evacuees with no place to go and firefighters with precious few resources to contain the damage.

Sam may still be mostly human, but he left a trail of sulfur these days. And so did every other demon running around topside since the gate opened. And there were too many of them and not enough hunters left to beat back the rising tide.

  
*

 __  
May 2007  
Day 8

Dean’s been coiled tight like a spring, pacing around motel rooms and fidgeting with the plastic knife he’s got shoved between the cast and the skin on his right arm, using it to scratch.

He climbs into John’s bed each night without a word, not pushing for anything, but not staying away either.

“Dean - ” John starts to say one night, meaning to explain.

 _It was a mistake_ , he’s supposed to say. He’d been half out of his mind after Cold Oak. He wasn’t - they weren’t. It wasn’t going to happen again. The words don’t come out, which is fine because Dean looks dead-set on pretending to be asleep anyway.

Except the next morning when John steps out of the bathroom, Dean’s still laying in his bed, right arm thrown up over his eyes to block the morning light and his other hand clearly pumping away under the sheets. He could’ve waited for the bathroom like any other morning. This little show is entirely on purpose.

John swears under his breath and one corner of Dean’s mouth twitches up.

“You gonna stand there and watch?”

John clears his throat. “We’ve got a case.”

“And?”

“And I want to be on the road. Get up.” John can see Dean visibly bite down on a glib reply, something along the lines of being _up_ already, if John had to take a guess.

But instead he says, “Somebody dead?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Listen, I’m all for finding a hunt, especially since we’ve found jack and squat to do this whole past week, but seriously. Is anyone gonna drop dead if we take an extra ten minutes?”

Dean peaks out from under his arm, and when John doesn’t answer he blows out a sigh and kicks the sheets down off his legs. His t-shirt’s rucked up a bit, and he’s got the waistband of his boxers pulled down just under his balls. John sucks in a breath through his teeth, eyes fixed on Dean’s thumb smearing precum over the head of his cock.

John reaches out and wraps one hand around Dean’s wrist. He means to pull the hand away - pull him out of bed, get going.  But the moment he touches Dean, Dean’s thighs shudder and his stomach muscles clench. John’s hand is still wrapped around Dean’s wrist as he keeps pumping his dick.

“Please?” Dean begs on an exhale.

“No.”

Normally he wouldn’t give a shit, not if Dean took his business into the bathroom. But they’re not doing this, not whatever this is supposed to be. Not with John as a participant, active or otherwise. He’s got a year left and he can’t - _won’t_ \- do that to Dean, won’t make it any worse for him.  Not if he can help it.

Dean groans and John can see the muscles of his arm flex as he tightens his grip, one long slow pull all the way from base to tip and then back down for another.

John finally finds his resolve and locks his elbow, pressing Dean’s wrist down against his belly and holding it there.

“No,” he repeats.

Dean blinks his eyes open. “Seriously?”

“Bobby’s got something in Nebraska we need to check out.”

Dean stares at him, open-mouthed for a beat and then clamps his jaw shut. John can see the calculation in his eyes. They’ve been desperate for news and this is their first real lead since the gate opened, even if it is on the thin side - but he’s not going to mention that last part to Dean just yet.

John lets go of Dean’s arm and grabs a pair of jeans off the floor, dropping them on his chest.

“Get dressed.”

He doesn’t show it, but John’s half-surprised when Dean actually obeys, rolling out of bed and pulling his jeans up and wincing as he tucks his still half-hard dick into them. His face is tinged red and he won’t meet John’s eyes, but he grabs his bag and follows John out to the car all the same.

  
*

  
Dean settles in the passenger’s seat with his thighs spread wide and John guns the engine. They’re both quiet as they pull out of town.

Twenty minutes later Dean finally speaks.  “So what’s Bobby got?”

“Crop failures and a cicada swarm.”

“You want me to believe Bobby put out an APB on some fucking bugs - this is the hot case that couldn’t wait ten minutes?”

“It’s the best lead we’ve had in a week. Thought you were itching for a case.”

Dean is silent for a long minute. “You’re a fucking asshole, sometimes.”

John doesn’t mean to grin, but the corner of his lips quirk up anyway.

  
*

  
The bodies have been dead for days. Three of them, lined up on the couch next to each other, dead eyes still focused on the old tube-style TV, marinating in the early spring dampness.

Bobby hadn’t had much to go on, but it’s more than anything else they’d been able to find in the last week so they’d packed up and met Sam and Bobby just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska.

It’s weird as hell. No sulfur on site, no EMF, not even a damn hex bag after a couple painstaking hours of searching through the house. Dean chats up the coroner tech, finds out the C.O.D. for all three is dehydration and starvation.

“Well that’s a new one,” Bobby says.

“Might not be our kind of thing.” Dean is trying for casual but failing. John gives him a hard look.

“A whole family just sat down and died with a fully stocked kitchen twenty feet away?  That sound like ‘not our kind of thing’ to you?” John says.

Dean shrugs. There’s a tilt to his mouth that John doesn’t like, an edge John has learned to recognize after years of hunting together. Dean’s always had good instincts. John glances over at the door and back to Dean, who doesn’t nod but follows him out.

John doesn’t speak, just raises an eyebrow and waits.

“I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel right,” Dean says and rolls his eyes at John’s expression. “I mean, more not-right than usual, okay? No sulfur, no nothing, but I swear it’s got demon written all over it.”

“And how exactly is that ‘ _not our kind of thing_ ’?”

“You really think we should be messing with the heavy hitters right now? I mean, who the fuck knows what we let out the gate and you want to go running right into the thick of it first chance you get?”

“Dean, it’s my fault that bastard got the Colt in the first place. He opened the gate on our watch. That’s on me.”

“Yeah, and I should have taken Max out before he could open it. Or I could have taken the Colt and chucked it into Mount Doom before he could get the chance to use it. But you know what? I didn’t. I kept it because I wanted the fucker dead, and I took a chance.

“I’m just saying, we’ve got bigger things to worry about than what-ifs. Right now? You die and you go to hell, do not pass Go, do not collect two-hundred bucks. Don’t you think maybe we could just lay low for a bit, focus on keeping you breathing?”

“Since when are you afraid of a fight?” John says.

Dean’s lips twitch downwards. Sure, it’s a childish thing to say, barely a step up from a double-dog dare and here John is supposed to be the adult.

“Sometimes I am,” Dean says. “But I guess I got used to knowing you’d have my back if things really went south.”

John lifts an eyebrow. “I’m still here.”

“Yeah, for now.”

And John doesn’t have an answer to that, because for all time they’ve spent together, all the ways they’ve come to rely on each other, they never made each other any guarantees. He and Dean don’t live in a world where _forever_ has any actual meaning, that’s for people who live normal, easy lives; people who have the luxury of believing that a word and a promise could keep them safe. John had been one of those people, once.

He won’t let Dean fall for that same false hope. Not when he needs to prepare him for what’s coming, and sooner than Dean thinks.

“Yes, _for now_ ,” John says. “Dean, I’m not sitting on my ass when there’s work to do. And I sure as hell am not going to die slipping in the shower thirty years from now. We both know that.”

Dean opens his mouth to argue, but John’s already turning away to head back inside. Bobby’s on the phone, and it sounds like he’s got news.

  
*

  
John watches a man suck down a gallon of Drano while his wife screams for him to stop. He watches grainy security camera footage of one woman beating another to death over a pair of shoes.

Turns out the seven deadly sins are a bit more literal than he’d thought.

They’re locked and loaded in a ramshackle farmhouse just outside of town, one dead demon host still tied up in the living room and the six remaining bastards fighting their way inside, trying to pick them off one by one.

He hears Pride tell Sam to take his gun, press it right to his temple and pull the trigger. The devil’s trap on the ceiling is cracked through, useless. They’ve already lost.

He watches Sam lift the gun, sees the flutter in his throat as he swallows. Sam presses the gun to his head, cocks the trigger. And grins.

“Oops,” Sam says.

Pride sucks in a breath through its teeth, surprised and angry that his mojo isn’t working like it should and John takes advantage of the split second distraction and douses the demon in holy water, just as Sam lunges forward and manages to catch the demon in the foot with the _palo santo_ , nailing it down to the floor.  

An unearthly scream tears through the house as the wood pierces skin, muscle, bone. Sam doesn’t bother getting up off the ground before he starts the exorcism.

“ _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus..._ ”

From the sounds of it Tamara’s got one of the demons trapped and is halfway through an exorcism herself. Dean’s somewhere in the back, and Bobby’s in the other room with two more, John thinks. Three? There were seven of them, six left now, maybe five? He waits just long enough for Sam to finish his exorcism and then John races back to check on the others.

Tamara is shaking, standing with a sawed-off shotgun hanging loosely in one hand and open book in the other. She’s staring down at the limp body of what used to be her husband. _Later, we’ll deal with it later_ , John thinks and leaves her to her grief.

Dean is half soaking wet and half high with adrenaline. There’s a girl on the floor, sprawled out next to the toilet. Dean looks up as John comes in, eyes bright and burning with the fight.

“She okay?” John asks.

“Still breathing,” Dean answers, and they turn heel and head back to the front of the house. They’ll deal with the survivors later. First they’ve gotta make sure there _are_ survivors.

Bobby’s got a healthy looking shiner blooming on his face and the kitchen is wrecked but there’s a guy slumped over in one chair who looks like he might make it. Sam caught another one just outside the house, trying to run. John finds him crouched over her slumped body, his hands smeared with blood from the gaping wound in her throat. Demon inside must’ve carved up the meatsuit as a parting gift on its way out. Two out of seven might live and the body count in this town is higher than John wants to think about right now.

Afterward, no one speaks.  

They build a funeral pyre for Isaac and dig a mass grave for the rest. Two of the seven hosts are dropped outside emergency room doors with a shot at living, and the dead are dragged outside to be salted, burned, and buried deep.

Tamara stands alone by Isaac’s pyre, steady and still for hours until the fire dies down to embers and ash.

Sam breaks the silence. “Think she’s gonna be alright?”

They’re off a ways, filling in the pit with the burned remains of the other bodies they couldn’t save.

“Definitely not,” Dean says.

If John were a better man, he would go over, offer some honest but not unkind words for her to cling to. He won’t. He doesn’t have it in him. She’ll do just what he did - bury the embers deep within, still smoldering. It’ll burn through everything inside and leave nothing left but the hunt. John doesn’t know a better way; has nothing to offer her instead.

“If we let out the Seven Deadly Sins, what else did we let out?” Sam asks, eyes fixed on the pyre.

No one has an answer.

  
*

  
There’s a panic that rises in him, in the quiet moments when Dean’s out somewhere or maybe asleep, terror that he can’t quite keep down. He manages, barely, when Dean’s around and there’s something to do, a hunt, some other thing he can focus on.

He’s survived war and loss and pain so strong he thought he would be crushed under the weight of it. He’s afraid of hell, sure; he’d be a fool not to be. But that’s not what sets bile burning up his throat every now and again.

Hell is coming for him, one way or another. He’ll meet it when it does.

But Dean sometimes gets this look in his eyes when they’re on a hunt and shit is hitting the fan, like he’s waiting for John’s signal. Like he’s holding something back.

And Sam - Sam has something inside of him, something that was _put_ inside him, that didn’t die with Yellow Eyes. John spends more time than he means to thinking about Blue Earth, what Gordon had said before anyone realized John was there, listening.

Because what John needs, more than life, more than his own soul, is to know that his boys are going to be okay. And most of the time, he thinks, they will. They’re both smart, in different ways. Both strong, and capable, and well-trained too if John gives himself a little credit.

And then the quiet comes again. And Sam is a just a little too confident going up against a demon alone, and he sees that split-second look in Dean’s eyes, there and gone again.

Waiting.

  
*

_  
Present_

John’s got the doors and windows salted, sigils carved into the frames and painted on the floor under the tattered throw rugs, and every flat surface and a good portion of the walls covered in newspapers, marked up maps, crime scene photos.

He stares blearily down at the stack of notes spread out over the kitchen table.

He’d gone through them all last night, trying to put them in some sort of order that made sense.  Had spent hours scanning police reports and photos and for-shit quality photocopies of newspapers from twenty years ago where the letters are more a suggestion than actual text.

In spite of all of it - the salt lines, the sigils - at some point during the night Dean had shown up, leaning back against one wall with his arms crossed over his chest and a skeptical look on his face.

“Shut up, I’m working,” John had said, immediately regretting it.

He’d focused hard on the pages in front of him, but couldn’t quite stop himself from noticing Dean’s smirk as he drew an imaginary zipper across his lips, blood seeping out from the seam in the wake of his hand.

John had kept on reading. He couldn’t do anything about Dean. He’d tried. Rock salt, devil’s traps, goofer dust, holy water, silver - Dean would hiss like it burned and then break out in a wide open grin, like the grand flourish after a magic trick.

“Not a spirit, sorry,” it’d said, not looking sorry in the least.

“Then what the hell are you?”

“I’m Batman.”

It wouldn’t answer direct questions. It also wouldn’t fucking leave, no matter how far John drove or how many exorcisms he tried.  He’d burned Dean’s bones, his clothes, every last tape in the car, even that ivory grip pistol Dean had always liked best.

“Still tracking down Sammy, huh?”

John hadn’t answered. Dean wandered over to one wall, a map of the lower 48 almost completely covered in push pins and notes. He’d pulled the pins out of the wall one by one, dropping them on the stained carpet.

“Nope, no, ...and wow, not even close,” Dean turned back towards him. “I thought you were supposed to be good at this.”

Another minute ticked by, and Dean pulled out another pin. “Schenectady, huh?  Hey, remember that hunt up we did up by Saratoga Springs, what was that thing - ”

“No.”

“You don’t remember?” There’s still blood trickling down from the corner of Dean’s mouth. “I was twenty, twenty-one maybe. We were there for like a week.”

“No, _we_ weren’t anywhere for a week.”

“Suit yourself,” it said.

In the next second, Dean was gone.

When he wakes up the next morning there’s a single trail of push pins left on the map, meandering right through the heart of the country. Fredericksburg, Texas. Albuquerque, New Mexico. It ends in Colorado Springs.

  
*

  
John sleeps only when he has to. In his dreams, Dean is always smiling. Not the cocky shell of a grin Dean always threw out when he was just barely keeping the words ‘fuck you’ locked down behind clenched teeth, and not the sick, slow curl of his lips John had seen just before he’d pulled the trigger.

No, in his dreams Dean wore a real, genuine smile as he twirled a scalpel in one hand, his fingers dancing over the blade like it was a musical instrument.

He sees Dean every night - awake or asleep. But it’s never really Dean, never the Dean that was his. The real one died months ago, begging for it with eyes that kept clouding over with black before snapping clear again.

“I need you to do this, please, I can’t - don’t let me become something I’m not. _Please._ ”

The shot was probably the cleanest one he’d ever made. Point blank range with the Colt, right between the eyes. Dean had just started to grin in that last second, eyes black once again. This time they stayed that way.

That wasn’t the Dean that showed up in his dreams. The thing wearing Dean’s face didn’t have black eyes. It had knives, and matches, and needles, and hooks that tore through John’s skin. It had lips that were bright red from mouthing and kissing along John’s skin before the cut and sometimes after, too.

“Why aren’t you following the trail I left for you?” it asks.

John spits out blood and doesn’t answer. It’s not defiance, he just can’t. The air burns his lungs and his throat feels flayed raw and Dean is standing there in a worn-soft black t-shirt and old ripped jeans and the hems are soaked in blood.

It steps close, eyes wide and clear green and earnest.

“I’m trying to help. I _want_ you to find Sam.” It tips its head to one side. “We’ve got a little business to work out, the two of us.”

They stand eye to eye, John’s arms wrenched up over his head, a meat hook speared through the muscle just under his collar bone. Finally it steps away, back to the table.

“Besides, I’m a sucker for family reunions. I’d join you, if I could. Maybe next year.”

  
*

  
John wakes up drenched in sweat and freezing cold. It’s a new motel room, he doesn’t remember how he got here, but that’s not anything new. He’s been running on fumes for longer than he can remember and drinking more than he knows he should. The same map is up on the wall, same pushpins marking the way. He doesn’t remember taking it down, or putting it up again. So much of him runs on autopilot these days, his thoughts too focused on finding Sam.

He splashes water on his face and takes a few gulps from the tap.

He needs to pull his shit together, the state he’s in now he’s useless. He knows Dean isn’t real - he can’t be. It’s his own fucked up mind doing this, which means it should be something he can control.

It also means that the trail of pins left in the map is from his own head, so maybe there’s a pattern there that he’d tweaked on without realizing it. The part of him that remembered the real Dean and his freakishly good instincts, leaving him a clue.

He grabs his crap and is out of the room and back on the road in minutes. He leaves the map behind.  He doesn’t need it; he’s had it memorized for weeks.

  
*

 __  
June 2007  
_Day 45_

Sam is in the other room interviewing the victim’s family, and Dean’s got a dark blue windbreaker and a ballcap on identifying himself as an M.E. with the coroner’s office. John is standing in the doorway to block the view so Dean can do a quick sweep of the bathroom for EMF.

“Is all this necessary?” The wife is saying, she looks and sounds like she’s hanging by a thread. “He slipped in the shower, I just - I don’t understand.”

“I’m very sorry, ma’am. It’s standard procedure. We’ll be out of your hair in no time, I promise,” Sam says. He sells the empathy bit damn well, and John knows that doesn’t come from himself. Must be some of Mary survived in the kid after all.

Dean makes a slow circuit of the room but comes up empty. He glances over at John and shrugs. Mouths the words, ‘ _Nothing. You?’_

John nods towards the window, the only other possible entrance to the bathroom. There’s a smudge of something on the sill, might be dirt, might be something else. Dean snaps a picture with his phone, runs one gloved finger through the smudge and rubs it between his thumb and forefinger to give it a sniff.

“Not blood,” he says quietly.

Head wounds bleed like a motherfucker, and the vic had gone skull first into the lip of the tub before seizing and eventually dying from the head trauma. The floor was still covered in it, little flags everywhere to mark the dark pools and smears, enough that they had to be careful where they stepped.

Dean peers out the window, down to the ground. It sounds like Sam is wrapping it up in the next room, so they leave the bathroom as Dean shucks his gloves.

Outside, Dean circles around to the back of the house, stops to look up at a second floor window. There are no trees close to the window, no overhang or porch roof to climb to get up there.

Dean pulls out his phone again and tosses it over to Sam to show him a picture of the blood smear on the windowsill. “So what, the thing just levitated up there?”

“Or it was already in the house, and it hit the window on the way out,” Sam says.

They haven’t seen the body yet, but the first responders had said there weren’t any defensive wounds. Although they might not have looked all that hard - who checks for defensive wounds on an unlucky bastard tripping in the shower?  He makes a mental note to go over the coroner’s report later, maybe get into the morgue tonight to see for himself.

They’ve got five bodies spread out over three towns and no cohesive theory to link them all together except they were all male, late twenties to early thirties, all five of them with wives and young kids. The first guy had belly-flopped right onto a table saw in his own garage. The second fell off a ladder cleaning the gutters and broke his neck. The third was a car accident barely a block away from home, and the last vic died from  electrocution changing a lightbulb.

Sam loosens his tie as they head back to the car. “No EMF?”

Dean just shakes his head. They hadn’t found EMF at any of the scenes so far.

“Okay, so, maybe it’s just accidents.  Bad luck.”

“The stuff on the windowsill?”

“Could have been from something else. We don’t know, is all I’m saying. And the wife looked pretty broken up about it, I don’t think she’s the killer.”

John listens to them throw ideas back and forth. He’s got an idea what this thing is - all the victim’s have had kids and that’s got to be the link, but there’s something else, something bigger nagging at the back of his mind.

He shouldn’t be holding back when lives are on the line and he knows that, but in these last few weeks John has come to terms with being a selfish man. Sam never would have wanted John to sell his soul to bring him back, and tough shit, it wasn’t Sam’s choice anyway. He’d probably fucked Dean’s life all to hell when he dragged him into hunting, and ten times over since then by actually fucking the kid. It wasn’t going to make saying goodbye any easier, only messier.

Neither of those things had been right, but John had done them anyway because he’d wanted to and the hell with the consequences.

In less than a year he’ll be gone and the only thing he can do for either of them is make sure they’ve got each other’s backs. So he shuts his mouth and listens to the boys’ verbal sparring, ideas thrown out and shot down one after the other, point and counterpoint, all the way back to the motel.

“I got it,” Sam says near midnight.

Dean looks up.

“What do you know about changeling lore?”

“Evil monster babies?” Dean says.

“Not necessarily babies, but there’s a kid in every one of the victim’s homes. And the one today - I don’t know, something seemed off about her.”

“Was she looking at you like you were a nice tasty Lunchables?”

Sam purses his lips. “Not at me. At the mom.”

“Eugh, really?”

Both of them turn to John.

“Sounds about right,” John says. “Changelings kill the fathers to get them out of the way, then snack on the moms.”

“When you say ‘snack’ you mean like - ”

“What’d you find, Sam?” John interrupts.

“Snack, as in they drink the synovial fluid,” Sam says. “Takes a couple weeks for the mom to croak. They’ll have bruises on the back of their necks.”

“I’ll say it again, _ew_.”

Sam snorts. “You get excited about zombies and vampires, but changelings gross you out?”

“Hey, killing vampires and zombies is awesome,” Dean says. “Evil mom-sucking monster babies are just creepy. Speaking of, anything in the lore about how we gank ‘em?”

“Yeah, actually. Fire.”

“That’s gonna go over really well. Excuse me, ma’am?  We need to talk to your kid for a moment alone, please ignore the flamethrower. Standard procedure.”

“Not exactly,” John cuts in. “Changelings operate in a sort of pack. There’ll be mother changeling somewhere, probably wherever they’re keeping the real kids.”

“The real kids?” Dean asks.

“The mother changeling’s gotta eat too.”

“Seriously, _eugh_.”

“Dean, focus.”

  
*

  
The house is supposed to be empty.

Newly renovated, only been on the market a few weeks. John had considered squatting in it briefly, but the neighborhood’s too nice and it’s too close to the fourth vic’s house for them to go unnoticed. There’s a few more houses just like it going up just down the block; so far just the concrete slabs and the framing sticking up out of the bare red earth. Sam had been the one to point it out, even before John had made the connection. New builds, vacant homes, and the same red dirt from the last crime scene.

Sam and Dean take the front while John goes round the back.

He comes in through the kitchen, eyes finding the corners, tracking and dismissing shapes in the shadows as he moves through the house. There’s furniture in the house, too neat and perfect looking to be anything but staged.

The boys do a quick sweep of the upstairs while John finishes out the ground floor. Nothing. He opens the last door with practised care, takes the steps down to the basement as silently as he can. The basement isn’t finished up like the rest of the house - the stairs are open slat and creak with his weight. John holds in a silent curse and keeps his flamethrower up in front of him.

Dean is behind him, back a foot or so. Sam is crouched down at the top of the stairs, flamethrower on the floor beside him and a gun trained down into the room.

There are cages in the basement. Two-by-four frames and chicken wire, about chest high, but John figures if it’s where the kids were kept they probably didn’t need to be all that large or secure. The kids would’ve been weak from the feeding, and terrified. But the kids are gone now; every cage sits empty.

John swings around to check out the other side of the basement and takes a hard hit across the shoulder that grazes the side of his skull. He hits the ground and is vaguely aware of Dean yelling from somewhere behind him and then a short burst of fire that spits over him, racing over his back as he tries to blink away the double vision. He clamps one hand to the side of his head and staggers back upright.

Dean’s dropped his flamethrower in favor of a .45, finger indexed along the trigger. Sam’s got a line of sight too, right through the slats of the staircase. John can’t see his face, just the barest glint of the barrel of his gun pointed between the steps.

“Start talking or we start shooting,” Dean says.

There’s a woman standing in front of them, her hands held out in front of her, palms open.

“I’m not a monster.”

“Oh yeah? You wanna explain why you’re hiding in a basement, taking swings at people with crowbars?”

“I’m not one of them, I swear. I’m trying to find them,” she gestures at the cages. “When you came down the stairs I thought, maybe - ”

“A crowbar isn’t gonna do much against these things,” Dean says.

“It’s iron.”

“Still not gonna do much. You need fire to kill them.”

There’s a long pause. She nods. “Good to know.”

John blinks hard a few times to get rid of the stars. Even in the dark, she’d gotten a pretty good hit in. “Sam, hit the lights, would you?”

“You sure?”

He waves a hand at Sam, _get on with it_. The light is blinding after adjusting to the dark of the basement, and his head is ringing in pain. Sam comes back a minute later with ice wrapped up in a kitchen towel.

“Hey,” Sam slaps at John’s good shoulder and hands over the ice.

Dean’s still got his gun trained on the woman. She’s got her hands up, eyeing them each in turn. The crowbar is down at her feet. The sleeves of her jacket are just slightly singed. John breathes out a slow sigh of relief they didn’t roast a fellow hunter by mistake.

“Dean?” John says.

Dean lowers the gun slowly. “Sorry about the - ” he waves down at the flamethrower.

“Right. Um, sorry about your head,” she says to John.

“What’d you find?” John says.

“Nothing. They were gone when I got here.”

Her eyes flick down to a bundle at her feet. It’s a denim jacket, small enough for a kid. He has to ask. “They took yours?”

She looks back down at the jacket again and then meets his eyes.

“I found it down here. It’s his.” She swallows. “It was my son’s.”

  
*

  
There’s nothing in the rest of the house. Maybe the changelings were tipped off they were coming, from the looks of it they’d skipped town just hours before John and the boys had rolled in.

“Lisa Braeden,” she says and shakes his hand. “I run a yoga studio two towns over. Ran. I _ran_ a yoga studio.” She’s got a look on her face like she doesn’t know whether to smile politely or wince.

“I used to be a mechanic,” John offers.

That gets a quiet huff of laughter from her. “Right.”

Without anything better to go on, they pick the two nearest towns. Sam and Dean head north while John and Lisa head east, looking for the nearest new housing developments. Lisa is quiet but professional, even if John suspects she’s still wet behind the ears. John’s been driving for maybe ten minutes before she speaks again.

“So, the other two - they your partners?”

“My boys.” The lie sticks in his throat but it’s not the worst one he’s ever told, not by a long shot.

“Oh.”

“You been hunting long?”

“It feels like a lifetime ago.” She turns to face him. “A life sucking monster kidnapped my kid and replaced him with an evil clone. That was four weeks ago. Time is kind of relative.”

John just nods. It goes both ways. It’s been twenty years, but some mornings he wakes up and he swears he can still smell Mary’s shampoo on the pillow next to him. Feels like she was alive just yesterday.

They make a slow circuit of the town, Lisa directing him based on house listings she pulls up on her phone. They sweep a half-dozen or so empty houses in various states of construction before John checks in with Dean.

“We’ve got a whole lot of bupkis over here,” Dean says.

“Us too. You got any more houses to search?”

He can hear muffled talking as Dean checks with Sam.

“Yeah, we’ve got a few more on the hit list of fun for tonight.  You?”

“Nothing so far. One more development to check, a row of townhouses up on the west side of town. You check back in in an hour, got it?”

“Yessir.”

The townhouses are a bitch to search. The bones of the houses are all the same, but the layout inside each one is just slightly different; built to order. John wipes a hand over his face, reminds himself that repetition is no reason not to stay sharp. Lisa’s plugging along with grim-faced determination. She’s quick and quiet, which John appreciates - but he’s pretty sure she’s not combat trained, which makes him nervous.

Still, she’s pretty good with a crowbar, John admits to himself wryly.

John hears a soft creak from somewhere upstairs, holds up a fist before he remembers it’s Lisa behind him, not Dean. When he glances back at her it’s clear she heard it too, eyes fixed on the ceiling. There’s someone - _something_ \- upstairs.

He meets Lisa’s eyes and gestures, points to himself and up and then at her and down. She doesn’t argue. If it’s set up like the previous nest they’d found, her son could be down there in a cage, weak but alive. God, he hopes so.

John takes the stairs slowly. Lisa’s headed down to the basement, she’ll get the kids out if they’re down there. If nothing else he just needs to buy her some time. The first bedroom is empty, so is the bathroom. The next door is a linen closet that squeaks as he closes the door.  John curses silently. He might already be made, but there’s only one door left to check on this floor.

He kicks open the door with one foot, makeshift flamethrower held at the ready.

There’s a kid in the bedroom, crouched down by the bed with the phone in one hand. He drops the phone when he sees John, holds his hands up in front of him.

“Stand up.”

The kid slowly stands. He’s shaking and pale but looks uninjured. John glances away to check his reflection in the dresser mirror.  He’s okay. Just a kid.

“What’s your name?”

“B - Ben.”

“Okay Ben, where’s the monster?”

“She’s downstairs - I snuck up here before she came back - ”

“Stay here!” John turns and races back downstairs just in time to hear a crash and then a godawful shriek cut through the air. John can feel the heat of the flamethrower before he even rounds the corner of the stairs to the basement.  Lisa’s at one end, bruised and bloody but mostly upright, aiming the fire at a writhing figure John can only just make out.

The walls are lined with the same chicken wire cages as the other house, but this time they’re filled with cowering kids, huddled as far away from the flames as they can manage in the confined space.

“Lisa!”

The floor and walls are just unfinished cement, but the cages have wood frames, not to mention the stairs and the ceiling rafters. It could all go up any second if she doesn’t let up.

“Lisa, stop!”

Lisa startles and then comes back to herself.  She drops the aerosol can and the flames die down enough to see.  The blackened figure is still burning, but it’s no longer thrashing around.

John makes it down the stairs, drops to his knees to grab Lisa by the shoulders.

“You okay?”

She’s still staring at the burning figure on the floor. He shakes her.

“He isn’t here,” she says.

John looks around at the cages. There are five kids, girls and boys, all pale and scared.

“He isn’t here, _where is he!?_ ” she repeats, nearly screaming.

“Mom?”

Ben is standing at the top of the stairs, he’s got a kitchen knife in one hand and the other twisted up anxiously in the fabric of his t-shirt. Lisa doesn’t seem to have heard him yet, but she will. John stands up and takes a step back.

“It’s okay,” he says to the kid. “It’s safe now.”

Ben comes racing down the stairs into Lisa’s arms. At first she doesn’t seem to realize he’s there, patting at his back absently, still staring at the dying flames. Then her eyes widen and she makes a pained ‘oh‘ sound and buries her face against his neck.

John takes a moment to go over to the burnt body. There isn’t much left, actually, the body is gone entirely and only the smoldering clothes remain. John nudges at the mess with the toe of his boot and then stamps out the remaining flames. Only then does he turn his attention to the kids in the cages.

He hates to interrupt the reunion, but he lays a hand on Lisa’s shoulder.

“Any chance you have a mirror with you?”

“What?”

“The kids, I need to check them out before I open the cages.”

Her face transforms into a rictus of horror, her grip on Ben loosening minutely.

“I checked him already. He’s fine, it’s him. I just need to check the others.”

Lisa’s hands clench down on Ben’s arms for a brief second before she lets him go. “Will a camera work?”

“Should do it.”

She hands over her phone with a camera display up. John checks over each of the kids in turn before he cuts the cages open. The kids crawl out one by one, huddled together in the middle of the basement floor, still eyeing the smoking remains of their captor.

John calls the boys. “We got her.”

“Everyone okay?”

“Yeah, we’re fine. If you could put in a call to the local PD with an anonymous tip that’d be helpful. We got a bunch of scared kids here.”

“On it. We’ll head your way, be there in about about 45.”

They hang up and John notices Ben looking up at him. “I - I called the police. I was talking to some lady when I heard… when I heard it.”

“They sending someone out?”

“I think so. She thought I was lying but I think I made her listen.”

Lisa plants a kiss on his forehead. “That’s good, you were so good. I’m so happy you’re okay, baby.”

He feels bad leaving, but he doesn’t exactly want to be around when the police show up with questions. He picks up the burned clothes and Lisa’s makeshift flamethrower, crouches down to have a word with the kids.

“Anyone asks, you tell them the mean lady took you and then Lisa here found you. Nothing about the fire. The police want to help you, but they won’t understand about that. Got it?”

The kids all nod, but it’s a shot in the dark knowing what they’ll actually say to the police. Hopefully the authorities will chalk up any slips in the story to trauma and just ignore it. Anything is fine so long as he doesn’t end up with an artist’s sketch of his face in the papers.

John slips out the back door just as the first police car rounds the corner.

  
*

  
He meets the boys at a motel just outside of town. They looked tired, but none the worse for wear. Sam asks about the hunt, about the kids and Lisa and how John was sure there weren’t any others.  The truth is, he doesn’t know for sure. There could be more changelings out there, but if they got the mother-changeling then the others probably burned up with her.

Dean just nods and heads for the bathroom.

Sam takes the room next door and John falls into bed for the night without a word.

John wakes up to his phone buzzing, with Dean’s nose pressed into his shoulder and the blankets kicked down around his knees.  One arm is tingling with pins and needles and his shoulder aches; he’s getting too old for this crap.  He flexes his hand, stretches out his arm and rotates his wrist around to get the blood flowing again.  He nudges Dean with one elbow and Dean grunts and tucks his face further down into the sheets.  John’s been watching him sleep for too many years to fall for it.  He checks his voicemail and flicks Dean’s ear.

“Get up.  There’s a nightgaunt snatching kids from a summer camp up in northern Wisconsin.”  John levers himself out of bed and starts pulling yesterday’s jeans back on.

“Yeah?”  Dean pushes up on his elbows and rubs the back of one hand over his eyes.  “It’s like six in the morning.”

“And we’ve got a case.  Get dressed.”

Dean sits up but doesn’t make any further move to get out of bed.  “Don’t nightgaunts hunt when it’s - you know, night?”

“We’re nine hours away and we’ve got witnesses to interview before tonight.”  John sits down on the edge of the bed, still trying to roll the stiffness out of his neck.

Dean snorts.  “It’ll take us eight hours, max.  Eight and change if we stop for drive-through on the way,” and there’s just the tiniest hint of a wheedling in his voice.  John pretends to ignore it.

Dean’s never done well with being ignored.  John feels lips brush the back of his neck and he wheels around to catch Dean’s chin in one hand.  
  
“I want to check in with Lisa and the kid before we leave, make sure they’re okay. Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

There’s a long moment where their eyes are locked and John is convinced Dean is going to keep arguing.  Finally Dean’s gaze drops and he leans back.

“Fine.”

They meet up with Lisa and Ben for breakfast at a diner down the road. Ben eats a stack of pancakes the size of his head, drowning in syrup and Lisa looks on, amused but clearly not in the mood to bug him about it.

“I just wanted to thank you,” she says, looking at each of them in turn, her eyes landing on John last.

“We didn’t exactly do much,” Sam says.

“You helped. This past month, everything that’s happened... everything I’ve seen. It’s hard to face that kind of thing alone.” She meets John’s eyes. He understands, they both do.

“So now what?” Dean asks.

“Now we start over. I’ll sell the studio and the house back in Cicero. Find a town without any bad memories, find a house. Something old, no more new construction.” She grins.

Ben drops his fork. “We’re _moving?_ Man, that blows.”

“Hey, language there buddy!”

“Sorry, Mom.”

Ben digs back into the pancakes with slightly less gusto.

Lisa pulls John aside in the parking lot as they’re heading out. Dean is off to the side, teaching Ben some sort of complicated handshake with Sam looking on in amusement.

“You think he’s going to be okay?”

“He’ll be fine, kids bounce back,” John says without knowing if it’s true. “What about you?”

“Oh, you know, nightmares for the rest of my life and I probably won’t let my kid leave the house until he’s thirty, but I’ll be okay.”

John clears his throat. “And what about hunting?”

“Look, no offense - I think what you and your boys do is great - but hell no. I’ll salt the windows and doors, sure, but I’m not going looking for trouble. I’ve got a kid to raise, and I’m all he’s got. I can’t risk that.”

Lisa purses her lips and looks over at Ben and the boys.

“I set him on fire, did you know that? The other one. I saw my kid burning alive. And I knew it wasn’t him, not really, but something like that - it doesn’t go away. I don’t want to see anything like that ever again. I can’t.”

John gets it. He wishes he could go back, erase from his memory some of the things he’s seen, things he’s done. He wishes he could make that choice for the boys too; take them both out of the life and set them down in some no-name town with boring jobs and families and mortgage payments to worry about instead of demons.

But it’s too late for them, for all of them. You can only spend so much time down in the mud and the trenches, with the monsters and demons before it starts to get inside you. Little tendrils of muck inside your bloodstream, creeping through your thoughts, keeping a normal life just out of reach.

There’s still a chance for Lisa and Ben, and that’s something, at least.

  
*

  
John can smell something - it reminds him of midnight mass on Christmas Eve and a chorus of voices murmuring, _And also with you_. At first it’s soothing. He thinks of being young, skinned knees and scuffed shoes, with all the world stretched out before him. But the scent thickens and turns sour, and John is suddenly wide awake.

Wide awake, and completely unable to move.

His eyes are open but he can’t turn his head, he’s just staring up at a water-stained motel ceiling like hundreds of others he’s never bothered to look at before. His body is frozen in place, face up on the bed with the covers kicked down by his feet. He can feel them, bunched up and just brushing his toes. His toes, that he can’t move like any other fucking part of his body.

They could have missed a changeling, or picked up a unwelcome guest on a hunt weeks ago. It’s happened before. Hunts they thought were done and dusted with just one more hanger-on that needed to be put down.

There’s a soft _shush_ of fabric, the creak of floorboards and a whispered curse.   _Dean_.

“Don’t worry,” Dean says. “I’ve almost got it.”

John blinks up at the ceiling in reply. He can’t see Dean - from the sound of it he must be somewhere off to the right.  John can hear a light scratching sound.

He wants to ask _What?_ and _How?_ but can’t manage to get his lips to so much as twitch. All he can do is make a sort of gulping noise in his throat.

Dean must’ve picked up on it. “Just a few more minutes, we’re almost there.”

The scratching stops and he hears Dean rustling around in what must be his gear. A few steps and a slice of Dean’s face comes just into view, leaning over him. He’s chanting in a language John knows he’s heard before, and sprinkling a fine gray powder over John’s body, head to toe. It isn’t until John feels the powder settling softly on his skin that he realizes he’s naked.

Dean wipes away the powder with a washcloth and pulls the sheets back up. Candles burning around the bed are blown out one by one, counterclockwise. Unravelling. When the last flame turns to smoke John’s entire body flinches; his body is his own again.

“Dean, wha-” John coughs and swallows, voice rough. “What the hell?”

“I know, sorry. You weren’t supposed to wake up.”

Something cold settles in John’s chest at those words. He levers himself up on the bed, stiff like he’s spent hours holding position. Dean is sitting on the other bed, head bowed and hands rubbing at his temples. Kid looks exhausted.

Dean looks up, something off kilter in his eyes. “Right, okay. You’re gonna go back to sleep now and not remember any of this when you wake up.”

He wakes up.

  
*

_  
Present_

Amarillo, Texas is quiet for a city of nearly 200,000.  

Empty cars are stopped in the middle of the road, engines still running. The stop lights are still working, directing no traffic at empty intersections. John parks barely a mile inside the outer city limits and checks out the nearest building on foot. There’s evidence of violence - blood spattered on walls, furniture upturned or shattered, but no bodies.

John checks an entire block of office buildings and apartments. He finds not one single person, living or dead.

It’s Rivergrove all over again, on a massive scale.

John spends the rest of the day exploring the city. Every building is the same - torn up like a tornado had ripped through inside and out, but not a single piece of evidence pointing to where everyone had gone.

It takes him a while to recognize the smell, faint as it is, barely more than a pinprick sticking in the back of his throat. Sulfur. There’s no residue anywhere he can find, no telltale film of yellow powder lining windowsills or empty car seats, the scent is so faint it’s almost a memory in the air.

These days, he dreams in sulfur. Smells the phantom tang of it in the shower, in the morgue; driving eighty miles an hour with all the windows rolled down, he smells it. It took him a while to realize that this time the smell was actually real.

It’s been a day at most, given that some of the cars have enough gas left in the tank to still be idling. He’s too late, but closer than he’s been in months.

John leaves behind the ghost town of empty houses and empty streets.

  
*

  
Fifty miles outside of Colorado Springs he has to pull over when he can’t see straight anymore. It makes his fingers itch, knowing Sam is so close but John’ll be useless if he can’t even stand up when he gets there. Gordon is farther out, coming in from a case up near Petosky; he’ll check in when he’s close.

John pulls off to the side of the road just outside of Pueblo and shuts his eyes. They feel like sandpaper when he closes them, has to rub his hands over the closed lids, digs the heels of his hands into the sockets until the scratchy feeling subsides. He blinks a couple of times and then whips around when he notices Dean sitting in the passenger seat.

“Hiya,” Dean says. He’s got sunglasses on and he’s wearing a familiar worn-out brown leather jacket, and he’s leaning back against the passenger side door, one hand raised up in a casual wave.

“So, I’m not one to say ‘I told you so’ but - I totally told you so.” Dean grins at him. “Colorado Springs up next, huh?”

John closes his eyes. The kid is some figment of his imagination, probably brought on by sleep deprivation. If he could just get some fucking sleep he could make this go away. John hears the telltale click of a lighter and opens his eyes. They aren’t in the car anymore.

They’re standing in an open field, pale yellow grass sweeping around their legs, almost up to the knee. Dean is walking around him in a slow circle, lighting the grass on fire with a wide slow sweep of his arm.

There’s a fresh grave in the middle of the field, a hackneyed wooden cross sticking out of it, the bare dirt piled high next to the hole.

“You have a choice, John.”

John climbs to the top of the dirt pile, rips off his outer shirt to hold over his nose and mouth. Dean stays in the tall grass, flames licking up his legs and teasing at his fingertips. He holds his hands out over the fire, rubs his palms together like he’s cold.

It isn’t real. John’s asleep in the truck. If he focuses hard enough he can feel the edge of the bench seat digging into the backs of his thighs.

“I’ve never lied to you. Well, not explicitly.”  Dean points to himself.  “This _is_ actually happening.”

Dean glances around the field, seemingly unaffected by the fire. “Okay, not exactly this. I could show you what’s really happening to Dean, if you want. I could show you in real-time, 3D, smell-o-vision. Best entertainment money can’t buy.”

Dean snaps his fingers and a body appears, writhing in the fire. The skin is blackened, cracked and bleeding, hair and clothing and any recognizable features long gone, except for the eyes. Dean’s eyes. Whole and unburnt, wide open and bright green, staring at John. Sightless.

The other Dean looks between the two of them. “Oh now wait, I’m sorry - did you actually think he went to the _other place_ when you shot him dead?” It _tsks_. “No no no, Dean-o here has been on the list for the express trip downstairs for years. He’s ours. He’s _always_ been ours. Ever since he was six months old.”

The fire has spread to cover the field, it’s starting to catch at the trees on the edges of the clearing. John can feel the heat rising from the flames, not enough to burn him yet, but he’s only got so much time on his little island of dirt in the middle of the sea of fire.

“It’s not what you wanted, is it? It’s not what we wanted either, to be honest with you. We had big plans for Dean, and you ruined them. Now we have to take the long way around, burn away the last pieces of that pesky humanity before we continue.

“It’s a tedious process, breaking a soul like that. You have to take everything away, one bit at a time until there’s nothing but the pain. Because when all they have - all they can remember - is pain, that’s when they finally learn to enjoy it.”

It snaps again and the burned body turns over with aching slowness. It pushes up on hands and knees, crawling stiffly out of the fire towards John. As the first hand touches the dirt, the burns begin to fade. Wiped away like they never existed, revealing fresh pink skin.

Another hand follows, then his head and arms and torso. Hair grows back before John’s eyes, lidless eyes suddenly half-closed with new skin, eyelashes forming between one second and the next. The burned-Dean tips his head back far enough to see John’s legs, still crawling towards him out of the fire. The lower half of his body is still a blackened mess, but healing with every stumbling movement forward.

Dean crawls naked up the mound of dirt, out of the flames, his hands and knees slipping in the loose pile of earth. John stands frozen to the spot, watching. It can’t be real, can’t be Dean crawling like that, like his limbs are pieces of wood looped together on a string, pulled onwards like a marionette. Even hurt, Dean was always too agile to move like that.

Dean reaches up, grabs at the leg of John’s jeans. There’s a hissing sound, like steam escaping the fire - John realizes the sound is coming from the kneeling body at his feet, from between clenched teeth.

Dean lets go of John’s jeans just long enough to get another grip, higher up this time. In the flash of a second John can see the palm of Dean’s hand, turned purple and black where they touched.

“Dean - ”

Dean grabs on with both hands, presses his face into the jut of John’s hip, gasping and letting out aching noises with vocal cords are still stripped raw. Dean doesn’t seem to hear him, instead he drags his lips up over the seam of John’s pants. mouthing at the the soft bulge of his dick. John lets one hand fall to Dean’s hair, and the feel of it almost crushes him flat. He didn’t expect it to feel so... familiar _._

He remembers this. He remembers doing this with Dean, in motel bathrooms after a long hunt, sitting at a crappy linoleum table with Dean between his legs because Dean was bored with research, hell, in the car once or twice. His hand in Dean’s hair, Dean’s skilled mouth doing what he wanted because John was too far gone to object.

John looks down, can’t help himself. Dean’s lips go from red to purple to black and back again in a full technicolor display each time he pulls away, only to come back again. John blinks hard, his eyes must be fucking with him, but they’re not. Every part of Dean touching John’s body is blistering and turning to ash.

John jerks back and Dean stumbles forward after him, still naked on his knees, reaching out.

With a couple inches of space between them, Dean looks whole and healed. His dick is soft and pink between his legs, his hands and lips fading from black to purple to fresh clean skin.

Dean reaches out again, stumbling forward on his knees. An almost pained look on his face, begging; speechless.

“Dean,” John says and his voice breaks with it.  He knows it isn’t real, none of this is. Except he can smell Dean’s recently burnt flesh, and feel the searing heat of the fire all around them. The dirt under his boots is loosely-packed but solid enough to hold his weight.

Even if this is just a dream, what if the thing taunting him is right? What if Dean’s soul was doomed the second the first drop of demon blood touched his lips twenty-three years ago?

What if Sam’s was too?

When John opens his eyes hours later the dream is gone; wiped clean from his mind. There are so many missing pieces there he’s long since stopped being bothered by it.

He rubs sleep from his face and gets out of the car to stretch. The field where he’s parked looks familiar, but it’s empty except for a thick growth of tall yellow grass. He checks his weapons, checks his watch. He’d slept longer than he meant to.

  
*

  
John meets up with Gordon in an industrial park on the outskirts of the city. Gordon’s got a map of town spread out over the hood of the car, covered in grease pencil markings and shorthand notes.

“Anyone else coming?”

John shakes his head.

He’d made calls on the way over, every name in his book that he could trust. The list wasn’t long to begin with, and not one of them had returned his call. He’d spoken with Jim briefly, but Jim was wrapped up in a case up near Des Moines and was in need of some backup himself. All John could offer was to wish him luck and offer swing by when he was done here, if he was still breathing.

He’d left messages with Bobby. With Ellen and Jo. With Lisa and her kid, who’d been sucked back into the life not long after John’s deal had been broke. He’d heard updates on all of them here and there through the grapevine, but hadn’t spoken to any of them in nearly a year. Like they knew it was his fault; what his boys had done, that he’d allowed it to happen right under his nose.

“Right then,” Gordon says. “Near as I can tell, he’s holed up on this block here. Dead center for the weather patterns we’ve been tracking. Had a contact of mine scope out the area best he could without getting too close.”

Gordon lays out eight-by-ten images over the map. Buildings, streets, a couple close-ups of demonic sigils carved into telephone poles and worked into back-alley graffiti.

“This one, here.” John taps one of the pictures, a tall building located dead center on the block Gordon had pointed out.  “He’d go for the high ground.”

“Yeah, what I was thinking too.”

There’s a long moment they both spend looking over the map, the pictures, rearranging them on the hood of the car for a better idea of the lay of the land.

“Not having any second thoughts, are you?” Gordon says.

“Can’t afford to.”

Gordon nods slowly. “For what it’s worth, I’m sympathetic. I know you’ve got the stones to do the right thing, even if it kills you. I’ve been there. I know what it’s like.”

And he does. John knows about his sister, about the choice he had to make. It’s probably the reason why Gordon is the only one still here when everyone else ducked out.

John raps his knuckles on the hood of the car, right over the X on the map that marks Sam’s location.  “Let’s get moving. We’ve got work to do.”

  
*

  
John can practically feel it; power vibrating in the air, the hair on his arms standing on end and his heart pounding. It’s windy today, the air whipping around buildings and sending trash spiralling down the street ahead of him, dark clouds hanging low overhead. News says there’s a storm coming. John would bet on it.

He slips in through the parking garage, wearing an old maintenance windbreaker and a ballcap to hide his face from the security feeds.

The lock for the main utility room is easy enough to pick - although he’s not as fast as he’d like, not as quick as Dean used to be. He drops a rosary into the main water supply and whispers a quick blessing over the pipe.  He taps his radio, one short and two long bursts of static he barely hears over the churning of the furnace and the hissing pipes.

From all appearances, it’s just a regular office building on a regular work day. People bustle around him with file folders and briefcases, heading from one meeting to another. Talking about lunch plans and their kids’ soccer leagues. He wonders if they have any idea what’s camped out right over their heads.

There’s a clipboard sitting forgotten on top of a stack of boxes by the back entrance, he grabs it just for something to hold as he makes his way over to the elevators. The doors open, men and women in suits file in and out and mostly ignore him.

The elevator stops at the sixth floor and John gets out; he’ll take the stairs the rest of the way.

John hears two quick but clear taps come over the radio. Gordon’s signal: _Ready_.

John makes his way through the maze of cubicles to an odd little hallway near the back. His lighter sparks on the first catch and he holds it under the nearest sprinkler, the clipboard held over his head to shield from the thin spray of broken glass from the sensor and the rush of water that follows. Somewhere else in the building, Gordon is doing the same.

He runs down the hall through the sprinklers to the next one and lights that one up as well. One activated sprinkler isn’t enough to start to sound the alarm, but two or three in a row should -

And there it is. The fire alarm blares through the building, quickly followed by shouts and running feet of everyone heading for the stairs. John doesn’t waste time trying to be inconspicuous now; the second the alarms went off Sam would’ve known he was under attack. The water won’t affect Sam, he doesn’t think, but it should take care of any guards Sam’s got stationed in the building, at least for a little while. Every second counts.

John takes the stairs two at a time, up to the seventh floor and out. The sprinklers aren’t activated in the stairwells, and John takes the opportunity to yank the Colt out from under his windbreaker.  He checks the chamber as he runs. One bullet left.

The top floor is empty. There are desks and chairs all neatly arranged, large green plants tucked into corners and sleek brushed-metal signs marking every door and cubicle.

A glassed-in conference room takes up most of the far wall. Sam is standing in it, hands in his pockets, facing away.  John would recognize that mop of hair anywhere.

He raises the gun without thinking; finger indexed along the frame and his other hand cupped underneath. Automatic. He forces his arms back down, if he takes the shot now it’ll glance off the glass and be wasted. _One shot, one shot_ , pounds in his head.

His hands are steady. He always thought they’d be shaking.

John makes his way along the edge of the room, footsteps silent on the carpeted floor. He’s dripping with water. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Gordon coming around from the other side.

He’s barely four steps away from the open door to the conference room when Sam turns. Sam’s eyes find him immediately, not surprised in the least.

“You could’ve called ahead,” Sam says. His eyes are yellow. “Or was the holy water in the sprinklers your little way of saying hello?”

John raises the Colt and Sam’s eyes snap back to normal.

“Dad wait, _please -_ ”

John fires.

  
*

 __  
April 2008  
Day 361

He waits half an hour, tells himself he’s making sure Dean really is down for the count.

“You and Sam look out for each other, you got it? Everything I taught you two - that’s all I get to leave behind, you got that? You watch out for each other. Pull each other back from the edge.”

He says the words only because he knows Dean won’t hear them. He has to say them; has to say something, even if it’s not goodbye. He knows the boys must still be looking for a way out of the deal, just like he knows they won’t be able to find one.

John slips out of bed and dresses silently. He leaves the journal behind, and the keys to the car. He takes the distributor cap though - he wants Dean to have the car, but maybe not be able to drive her for a few days. John needs to buy himself space, and time, just enough that Dean won’t be able to follow.

Just four days worth.

He nicks his finger with the tip of his field knife, smears a little blood on the doorframe, down by the handle and calls the cops from a payphone.

“Hey, I work downtown and I uh - ” John hesitates, last chance to back out. He can’t; not anymore. “I just saw a guy going in a motel room down the street. He had blood all over him. It looked real bad.”

Dean loosely matches the description of a suspect in a local PD case, a description John is sure to pass on to the desk clerk on the other end of the call. It’s why they’re in town, not that Dean knows it. He can talk his way out of this, John knows. John’s blood won’t match the vic’s and in any case, they were three states away with plenty of eye witnesses at the time of the crime here. But it’ll hold Dean up for a good day or two, give John enough of a head start to get gone.

John walks two blocks over, grabs a car from from the side of the street and hotwires it.  He doesn’t have a destination in mind. Anywhere, so long as it’s not here.

He calls Sam from a payphone on the edge of town, but he doesn’t pick up. Sam’s been screening his calls. It doesn’t come as a surprise. They haven’t spoken in weeks.

John hangs up before the machine starts recording. No sense in leaving Sam a message, not when he can’t find the words. If he knew how to say goodbye he wouldn’t be running.

  
*

_  
Present_

The shot hits true, a dark bloom of blood forming just between Sam’s puckered eyebrows. Time stops in the moment it takes Sam’s expression to go from shock to confusion to an awful sort of emptiness.

There must be a sound when Sam falls to his knees - the earth itself must shake, but John doesn’t hear it. He’s deaf from the shot, blind except for the sight of his son’s face.

His smiling face.

“Did you really think that would work?” Sam says.

Gordon fires four shots in quick succession, a tight grouping centered on Sam’s heart. John doesn’t know what kind of bullets Gordon loaded up with, but it’s not the Colt and apparently even that is useless. Sam takes the bullets with nothing more than a resigned huff.

“John...” Gordon says, a warning. They hadn’t come with a backup plan.

Between one second and the next, Sam blinks and the wounds are gone, the bullets all dropping harmlessly into his open palm.

“Did you really think that I would leave you wandering around with a weapon that could kill me? C’mon Dad, you raised me smarter than that.”

“Sammy - ” The Colt falls to the floor. John goes flying backwards, slamming against the far wall and stuck there by an invisible force. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Gordon held in a similar position not twenty feet away.

“I’m not a demon, Dad. I’m not some ghost, or a spirit, or a _witch_ ,” Sam spits. “I’m not anything you’ve ever seen before.”

“You’re my son.” _You’re Mary’s boy_ , he wants to say.

“Maybe I was. Not anymore.”

“How? From the blood, from breaking the deal - how did you -”

There’s a snort from the other end of the room. John twists around to see Dean sitting on a desk, kicking his heels idly against the filing drawers.

“He thinks we broke the deal. He still doesn’t get it,” Dean says. “I tried to tell him.”

Sam glances over at Dean, a brief flash of anger and it’s gone.

“You’re dead,” John whispers.

“Am I? You shot me in the head too, how’d that work out for you?”

“This… this isn’t real.”

Dean’s legs stop swinging. “Hey Sammy, look who’s finally starting to get a clue.”

  
*

 __  
May 2008  
Day 365 

There’s salt and goofer dust, iron and silver, blades and guns and amulets collected from all across the lower forty-eight. It’s not his entire collection, he’d left some behind in the trunk of the car, other stashes in other states. But this was the lion’s share of twenty-four years of hunting, holed up in a storage locker in Utica. John dumps what he’s got on him - a couple blades, his M1911 pistol, a flask of holy water. His wallet. A faded picture of Mary holding tiny baby Sam. He keeps the flask, pours out the holy water and replaces it with something stiffer.

He feels naked without his weapons, but there’s nothing for it. He wants to fight - with every fiber of his being he wants to go down swinging. It’s not in him to lay down and die. But if he goes back on the deal, Sam will be the one to pay the price.

John presses a kiss to his fingertips and touches them to Mary’s face in the photograph.   _I’m sorry_. _I’m so sorry._

He’d done the best he could without her. It hadn’t always been enough. One last time he’ll give everything he can to protect her son, and one last time he knows he’ll disappoint them both.

He resets the trip wires and locks up the storage unit, tucking the key into the gap under the door. The boys will find it someday, he knows. They both know how to pick locks.

The last of the whiskey burns down his throat as he walks out of town. He doesn’t look at his watch; doesn’t need to. He can feel the seconds slipping away, see them in each face that distorts as he passes on the street. He can hear it in the faint growl of the hellhounds, growing louder.

The field is empty of anything except tall yellow grass, leaning drunkenly under the patches of still-melting snow. It’s as good a place as any to die.

“I’m almost disappointed, John. No devil’s trap, no Colt up your sleeve. It’s the little things that make a girl feel special, you know.”

“I kept my end of the deal.”

He turns to face her. She’s not riding the same body as last time, he can’t even be sure it’s the same demon, he never saw her true face last time. He can see it now, her real face - the one inside the meatsuit.

“So you have. And we’ve kept ours.”

The braying of the hounds is closing in from all sides, John scans the field but can’t pick out anything yet.

“I go without a fight and Sammy stays alive. That was the deal.” John wants to make sure. He needs to be sure. He clenches his teeth and wills himself not to move, even when he feels the hot breath of the hounds at his back, circling. Something snaps at his calf, drawing blood through his jeans.

“Sam is alive. For now,” she says.

She sticks two fingers in her mouth and whistles. Pain rips through his legs as the hounds attack. He drops to his knees, hunching over in a desperate bid to protect his middle. They rip through the skin and muscles of his arms, his legs, his back, and then into the soft skin of his belly. At first the feel of his own blood spilling out is warm, almost comforting through the pain. Then he grows cold.

Then he doesn’t feel anything at all.

  
*

 __  
May 2008  
Day 366

Mary and Dean stand in front of him, shocking in their similarities. They have the same wide eyes, the same curve to their lips. He doesn’t know how he never noticed. Not that he’s ever seen them side by side before, not in life.

“He’s awake,” Dean says, looking straight at John.

“Good, then we can get started.” Mary grins and holds up a meat hook on a thick length of chain. She stabs the hook into his shoulder, just under the collar bone.

John is dragged up off the ground until his feet just barely touch, the hook tearing through the muscles in his shoulder, scraping against the bone as he swings. His right arm hangs useless against his side, leaving him to scramble desperately with his left hand, trying to get hold of the chain without wrenching the hook further. He can’t.

Dean walks around him in a slow circle, flipping a knife over and over in one hand.  “Where do we start?”

“I have some ideas,” Mary says. It’s not her. It can’t be - Mary wouldn’t be here, she never made a deal like he did. “I’ve been waiting twenty-four years for this.”

The blade sinks into his flesh and John howls.

  
*

 __  
Present  
_Day 398_

John thinks he’s sixty miles northwest of Wichita Falls, and the air feels so thick with heat and dust it’s like a second skin.  His shoulder is killing him, stiff from the long drive. If he closes his eyes he sees Dean grinning back with three black holes in his head. When he opens his eyes he sees Sam, standing in a bar surrounded by the bodies of his victims.

“We can make it stop, John.  Any time you want.” It’s Mary’s voice, although he can’t see her. Doesn’t want to, not here. She doesn’t belong here. “You know what you have to do, just say the word.”

John shakes his head and focuses on the task at hand. Gordon must be screening his calls...

 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for the wary: Canon compliant major character death, physical and psychological torture. This fic is partially set in Hell, so... you know. Bad things happen. Back to top.
> 
> * * *
> 
> A/N: So with this update, I've now passed the +100k words mark which is far and away the longest thing I've ever written. Woah.
> 
> The next part in the series is tentatively titled "Through Smoke." While it's still going to be somewhat dark in subject matter, I think it's a little lighter at least, since it focuses on what Sam and Dean were really up to during John's last year and what they're doing now to bust him out. ;)
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's still reading this! I'm pretty nervous about this part, because it goes pretty dark. Comments, questions, and concrit are always welcome!


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